Snapshots
by Ravenclaw42
Summary: The evolution of the JohnAeryn relationship told in fifty tiny glimpses, one sentence each. Originally done for a writing challenge.


These 50 sentences were written for a LiveJournal writing challenge called "1sentence." I had to write one sentence on each of 50 prompts, all relating to the pairing I chose, which was (predictably) John/Aeryn. I chose to put my sentences in chronological order, making the whole thing into a relatively cohesive overview of the evolution of the J/A relationship. I know I got kinda semicolon happy in places, but I'm still rather fond of this experiment.

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Fifty Snapshots  
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#36 - Market  
(Premiere)  
John Crichton's first small step -- humankind's first giant leap -- into the bustle of alien civilization was taken in the open-air market center of a commerce planet, small, filthy, crowded and loud; and though Aeryn called it backwater and scum, John thought it must be paradise.

#40 - Innocence  
(PK Tech Girl)  
Aeryn was hot-blooded (metaphorically) and hard-headed and still punished anyone within reach for the loss of her perfect soldier's life, while Gilina was sweet and innocent and blonde (not to mention, she looked achingly like Alex); it oughtn't to have been that hard a decision, but John was discovering fast that deep space was not so simple as Captain Kirk would have had him believe.

#07 - Chocolate  
Losing Earth and all that went with it was worse than the worst cold-turkey withdrawal John could have ever imagined, but when he finally realized that he had fallen in love -- with Aeryn, with space, with life on Moya -- the pain began to ease at the thought of all the things he would share when he found Earth again, the first and most desperate of those things being chocolate.

#09 - Telephone  
John liked the immediacy and inherent science fictiony-ness of the comms -- they helped him adjust to conversation without sight in a way that telephones never had, and besides, one sharp word in Aeryn's voice during a time of crisis was worth more than all the phone companies on Earth combined.

#10 - Ears  
There had never been more truth to the saying 'the walls have ears' than John had discovered in the process of living on a Leviathan; even Aeryn, used to military conformism and close scrutiny from higher-ups, was sometimes disconcerted by the sheer amount of knowledge Pilot and Moya managed to gather about the crew's private lives.

#15 - Touch  
For the longest time, she didn't understand his constant need to touch everything he saw, as if the reality of the universe was directly proportional to the amount of physical contact he had with it.

#02 - Kiss  
(The Flax, A Human Reaction)  
The incident on the dead transport pod was a collision born of pure desperation, but neither of them could deny that something deeper had driven them to it -- and later, on the Ancient's false Earth, they began the awkward process of admitting to themselves what that something was.

#06 - Rain  
(A Human Reaction)  
It was only afterwards that John realized how wrong he had been to look out at the rain and see only a grey dreariness and an obstacle to their escape, when he could have watched springtime bloom on Aeryn's upturned face.

#28 - Sickness  
(Nerve)  
Her gut roiled and rebelled, diaphragm spasming as she heaved, each breath a little more like dying; she saw him even through the fever, his too-close face all blurry concern, and some grudging, stubborn part of her resolved to hang on a little longer.

#04 - Pain  
(Nerve, The Hidden Memory)  
Pain, even when bloodless, was a messy business: all saliva and sweat and snot and tears and horrible tastes in the back of his throat; but where Scorpius thought he was hiding wormholes and Gilina thought he was hiding their history, they were all wrong, and the most painful task of all was hiding the memory of tangled hair and bloodied knuckles that lay deep beneath the surface.

#18 - Speed  
(Family Ties)  
When the hellish headlong dive was over, the adrenaline rush subsiding and leaving only a residue of cold, oily fear in the pit of John's stomach _(she will come for us, she has to)_, he found himself wishing for that speed again as the dark vertigo of space swallowed up his and D'Argo's infinitesimal forms.

#23 - Hands  
(Mind the Baby)  
Her hand was smaller than his but the wiry strength of it sang through his palm, their pulses synchronizing for an instant as their fingers intertwined, and it was then that he knew this was not goodbye.

#32 - Confusion  
(Our of Their Minds)  
Even in Rygel's body -- even in his own -- John could recognize Aeryn's voice before any of the others; she wore any body comfortably, as if it were her own, and he understood more than ever that her strength went far beyond the physical.

#48 - Waves  
(Look at the Princess)  
Because of that utter _yotz_ Dregon and his frelling fear of heights, Aeryn was developing a deep loathing of the ocean -- she spent _hours_ signaling out to sea before Dregon regained consciousness long enough to tell her that ships never sailed there; at least Crichton's dead weight wasn't so frelling _literal_.

#11 - Name  
(Look at the Princess)  
John tried, tried so hard it was almost a physical pain at times, but could not quite convince himself that because Aeryn had not borne her, his daughter meant any less to him; after all, he would never live to see her birth, much less know her name.

#37 - Technology  
(Soon after My Three Crichtons)  
Aeryn was taking parts from his ship for her Prowler again, but this time John said nothing -- not to avoid a recurrence of Pot & Kettle syndrome, from which the two of them suffered often, but because she moved with a steel-toed kind of grace, all concentration and military precision; and if there was one thing John had always loved to watch, it was the skilled manipulation of technology.

#46 - Sun  
(Won't Get Fooled Again)  
_Sun,_ John thought, intertwined and balanced precariously in one of the balcony railings at the fake IASA building like a child on a set of monkey bars, _sun, sunlight on my shoulders, Officer Aeryn Sun, come on Mister Sunshine won't you come out and play..._ and the inanities went on and on and on, until he was sick with them and sick with vertigo and sick with the knowledge that he could never leave this mad, made-up world -- that he was so very, very frelled in every way.

#38 - Gift  
(The Locket)  
When John told Aeryn that Chiana had stolen the locket, he had been incredulous that the fact had surprised her and had indeed caused her pain; he realized later, cane in one hand and the other arm around her stooped shoulders as they looked out at their garden, that perhaps the locket was the first real gift she had ever been given.

#33 - Fear  
(LGaM: With Friends Like These...)  
Aeryn had never known such fear as she felt when Jothee's innocent, uncomprehending eyes turned to hers, his voice echoing in her ears: _he let me go..._

#19 - Wind  
(LGaM: Plan B)  
John felt Moya's descent deep in his bones, a subsonic rumble that crescendoed unbearably as she swept past the Depository, shattering every window with her engine-whine battle cry; and John laughed as the wind of her passage whipped glass shards towards his unprotected face, referring not just to Moya when he thought, _That's my girl!_

#35 - Bonds & #49 - Hair  
(Die Me, Dichotomy)  
The cuffs were cold, made of some metal that he wanted to call steel but probably wasn't -- just another thing he didn't know, like the presence of the frozen lake, like what he'd said in the neural cluster. Holding D'Argo's knife in obscenely steady hands, he thought what a grim irony it would be to pull a Romeo right there and then -- he could feel the expectation in their gazes, burning into the back of his skull -- but he leaned down and gently took a lock of her fine hair instead; it felt warmer than her skin.

#45 - Hell  
(Season of Death)  
Somehow when she was just _there,_ standing there, Qualta Blade in one hand and silver suit near-invisible against the white but for its shining, it was easy to believe she had never been gone; but when she spoke and John tried to comprehend it, his mind failed him, so he held her instead, tight enough to bruise -- and the only hell he could imagine was letting go.

#22 - Jealousy  
(Green-Eyed Monster)  
As John watched Talyn's fabricated recording, the surge of sheer, seething hatred that overtook him was nearly enough to make him retch; ironically, that rage was probably what saved Crais's life -- since John, so terrified of what he had felt himself capable of for that one instant, retreated into an emotional paralysis that only allowed for cold glares and petulance.

#17 - Tears  
(Relativity)  
"You know, there's a line in a movie I saw when I was a kid," John murmured once her tears were spent and she lay still as death in his arms; "'If you've become human enough to cry, no power in the world can change you back.'"

#14 - Sex  
(Meltdown)  
John had gotten pretty used to being mind-frelled and some part of him recognized the symptoms, but this time it was completely voluntary and considering the circumstances, the only thing he could think was _frell the consequences_, because nothing mattered except Aeryn, gasping up against Talyn's blood-red walls.

#12 - Sensual  
Aeryn had never thought of anything masculine as being _sensual_ -- passionate and rough, yes, and often simple -- but though John's words were given Sebacean meaning and inflection by her translator microbes, his accent was still there: strange and lilting, and so rich... There was really no other word to describe it.

#03 - Soft  
Though John's hair looked coarse to the uninformed, Aeryn knew the secret texture of it; but nothing about him was as soft as his heart, save perhaps his eyes when he watched her pretending to sleep.

#08 - Happiness  
Moments were all they had, fleeting touches and smaller smiles, an unplanned and indispensable code of body language and empathy; they were constantly forced to find new understanding of the transient nature of happiness.

#16 - Weakness  
(Thanks for Sharing--Infinite Possibilities: Icarus Abides)  
When she finally gave in to it, that sentimentality she had always been told was a weakness she found to be her greatest source of strength; and even as he lay dying beside her, she could not regret that one discovery.

#30 - Star  
(The Choice, reference to Green-Eyed Monster)  
The city lights drowned out the light of the star he'd named after her... maybe that was part of the reason she'd chosen this place.

#13 - Death  
(Fractures)  
Seeing him standing there, with all the innocence and weariness and hope of the Atlas character he -- the other one -- had told her about, Aeryn felt something break deep inside her, though she had not thought there was anything left that could.

#21 - Life  
(Dog With Two Bones)  
Life or death in a coin toss: all the adventure stories John had ever read came rushing back, and decided then that he detested fiction, loathed the nagging childhood lesson that everything would turn out all right in the end.

#39 - Smile  
(Crichton Kicks)  
Aeryn smiled at him as she lay stretched out on the warm sand, and her face was (to be utterly cliché) radiant as the sun and made her whole being light up -- well, okay, John admitted, that image was disgustingly saccharine and utterly ridiculous, but he was running out of decent hallucinations to occupy the miserable, lonely days.

#44 - Heaven  
(Promises)  
Being rid of Harvey at last should have been heaven itself, but with the sickly shock of a discovery long suspected but never admitted, John realized that his own mind was a terribly lonely place without another presence to fill it... and the knowledge made him ache for Aeryn all the more.

#50 - Supernova  
(Kansas)  
Aeryn wore all clothes as if they were uniforms, but seeing her military precision wrapped up in a sixties hippie costume cracked John up so much he could hardly talk to her; he kept it to himself, though, because how was she to know that bellbottoms in a supernova of pastel shades was not exactly everyday wear on Earth?

#24 - Taste  
(Terra Firma)  
_It tastes like Fellip nectar,_ John thought, though he had never tasted Fellip nectar and perhaps never would; but he kept the bitter thought to himself and continued to sip the beer his father had handed him.

#05 - Potatoes  
(Terra Firma)  
Of all the extravagances John's alien friends were pampered with upon his return to Earth, Aeryn approved of nothing so much as the common potato: "Like a natural food cube," she said, the militaristic pragmatism still running strong in her veins, and John loved her all the more for choosing French fries over caviar.

#29 - Melody  
(reference to Unrealized Reality)  
John tried to pay Aeryn back for learning English by letting her give him lessons in Sebacean, though they mainly resulted in fits of shared hysteria and her being too amused by his ineptitude to continue -- even so, John thought the language was beautiful, almost melodic.

#27 - Blood  
John was always warm to the touch, even when he claimed to be cold; Aeryn sometimes wondered what it would be like to have hot blood -- a fever under her skin, the Living Death running in her veins and herself unaffected by it, free of the greatest weakness of her race.

#01 - Comfort  
Fate seemed to conspire against them at every turn, and it ran against all logic that each could still take comfort in the barest glance or whisper from the other... but they had both thrown logic out the window years ago, on the day they had lost everything they'd ever known while gaining only each other.

#26 - Forever  
Aeryn hated the concept of eternity -- maybe from some residual Peacekeeper conditioning, or maybe she just couldn't stand the thought of having that long to worry about losing John; one way or another, he understood, and his few whispered endearments never mentioned "forever."

#47 - Moon  
(Bad Timing)  
John had a little time, not much, but enough nonetheless -- enough to let a handful of grey dust run through his protected fingers, forming a little mound that would remain unchanged forever, or until his father's footsteps erased it; this he hoped, this he prayed for above all things: that Jack Crichton's legacy was not quite over, that mankind had one more old-fashioned moonshot left in it before the technology John was leaving behind made rockets obsolete.

#43 - Sky  
(Bad Timing)  
The baby was his and Aeryn had said yes and at that moment, the sky was anything but the limit -- it was only the beginning.

#41 - Completion & #20 - Freedom  
(post-PKW)  
The Eidelons' great work was only barely begun, and would never be finished -- John was well-traveled enough to know that much. But for now, at least, there would be peace: a little time to rest, a little room to breathe, and a whole universe to explore -- together.

#25 - Devotion  
(post-PKW)  
The fierceness of her devotion stunned him at times -- her almost animalistic single-mindedness, her willingness to kill or be killed when it came to protecting their child; it reminded him of the soldier she had once been.

#42 - Clouds & #34 - Lightning/Thunder  
(post-PKW, reference to AHR)  
"I'd like to see it again," Aeryn sighed, leaning back against him; "Earth, I mean -- the rain, the clouds."

"Next time we find it, we'll stay through spring," John murmured against the nape of her neck, as they swayed gently together on Moya's terrace; "Rain ain't nothing 'til you've danced in a thunderstorm."

#31 - Home  
Home: it had forever been the object of their travels, but in the end, each knew that it could exist nowhere without the other.


End file.
